Posts by Joe Wylie
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Man snog.
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Up Front: So Farewell Then, UCSA, in reply to Emma Hart,
the Art school prefabs had two toilets and cold water only for 100 students...The 1975 Commonwealth games used the venue then the Art school across the creek burnt down.
Apart from the Ilam homestead, reserved mainly for art school staff, the School of Fine Arts was housed in a horribly shabby collection of fibrolite hovels. The site is now a green lawn with a couple of oddly obvious artificial hillocks.
Perhaps it's an indication of past funding priorities that the 1974 Commonwealth Games prefabs were much better built. Relocatable housing from the athletes' village is still doing sterling duty - and came through the quakes largely unscathed - at City Housing's Forfar Courts complex in St Albans.
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Polity: TPP, eh?, in reply to Henry Barnard,
It is interesting to note that, on the same day, Wayne Mapp says
Brash's former "political correctness eradicator" isn't about to break his streak of being on the wrong side of history any time soon.
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Up Front: So Farewell Then, UCSA, in reply to Howard Edwards,
Concerts and plays in the Ngaio Marsh theatre, both in the audience (as a school kid in the 60s and as a student in the 70s)
Seeing as it seems to be OK to go back that far, there was the special meeting in the Ngaio Marsh in 1968 over a motion of no confidence in then student president Paul Grocott. Grocott was seen as insufficiently radical. For example, he refused to condemn the engineers' haka party, which if half the stories were true enjoyed a virtual license to rape during capping week. Anyway he survived the motion, only to be "shot" - with presumably a starting pistol - from somewhere up the back of the audience, followed by the lights being turned off.
As people left they were presented with a copy of a special edition of Kobold, an upstart rival to Canta, with a front-page "Grocott Assassinated" headline. There were supporting articles with headlines such as "Aesthetics of the Death Wish".
Innocent times.
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Polity: TPP, eh?, in reply to ,
The remains of the Auto industrie workers exist by scavenging scrap metal Etc.
Like this?
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There's a stainless steel memorial plaque affixed to a large boulder just across the Avon footbridge from the UCSA. From memory it reads:
TOM SKINNER
CAT
FRIEND OF THE UNIVERSITY
KILLEDThere's also a year, I think late 1970s. Anyone know Tom's story?
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Legal Beagle: The Greg King Memorial…, in reply to linger,
he invented a machine to turn him over in bed ... and was strangled by his sheets when it malfunctioned.
Midgely's life story would make a better movie than Ed Wood.
By way of a small footnote, leaded fuel contained an acid scavenging compound to prevent the buildup of lead deposits on internal engine components. When this acid compound recombined with the dampness that condenses on a cold exhaust from the combustion of hydrocarbon with oxygen in the air it formed pockets of wet acid.
Muffler shops loved lead tetraethyl and the rampant corrosion it produced. Now that it's gone, specialty exhaust chains such as Midas have had to reinvent themselves as general repair shops. Also spark plugs that formerly became fouled with lead residues now last much longer.
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Legal Beagle: The Greg King Memorial…, in reply to Myles Thomas,
Lead was banned here in 96
Lead tetraethyl was a seriously vile neurotoxin, with a very effective lobby actively overselling its spurious benefits. The phaseout in NZ only began thanks to then Minister of the Environment Phil Goff, who prevailed over Energy Minister Bob Tizard in convincing Transport Minister Prebble.
At the time it was played as a generational victory within Labour, with the hapless Tizard claiming that it wasn't an issue in a "well ventilated" country like NZ.
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Hard News: About Chris Brown, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
...and please after seeing the pandas in Tokyo zoo, don't do it!
Poor beasts looked despairingly bored and trapped (I know i'm being anthropomorphic), but there is little return to the animal's quality of life from our 'benign interest'.Tokyo's Ueno was a surprisingly horrible zoo when I was there 20+ years ago.
A pair of pandas were exhibited at Auckland zoo as part of a Chinese diplomatic offensive in November 1988. I guess whatever goodwill they created got wiped with the Tienanmen Square events of the following year.
The only upside I can see is the handy metaphor pandas provide for political cartoons. The pair that visited Auckland in the 1980s had spent time at Sydney's Taronga Park, where they dined on bamboo donated in response to a public appeal. A cartoon from that time showed a reluctant Hawke and Keating being forced to eat "grassroots" at a Labor Party conference, while a zookeeper stood by thanking party members for "bringing their special food".
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Capture: Steal Magnolia, in reply to Soon Lee,
Pretty. (The top & bottom ones look more like water lilies to me)
They're gorgeous. Are you using "water lilies" in a strictly botanical/taxonomic sense? While I'm no expert, I've always been intrigued by the idea of convergent evolution, so I was interested to discover a while back that the "true lotuses" are more closely related to proteas and plane trees than they are to water lilies.
